Kathleen McGarvey is a physicist with a passion for scientific communication and STEM outreach. She graduated from the University of Montana in 2010 with a bachelor’s degree in physics. She then moved to France where she spent several years working as a recruitment consultant in the pharmaceutical and biotech industries. In 2013, she came to Montreal to complete a MSc and PhD in integrated photonics at Concordia University. Most recently, she has worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the Énergie Matériaux Télécommunications Research Centre at INRS, where her research has focused on the development of photonic machine learning hardware.